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From: Gerd Müllenheim <>
Subject: Ethnic cleansing after WWII
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2004 16:41:57 +0200


Dear Guenter Boehm,

This could be your story, too:

In the winter of 1945, the world ended for ethnic Germans living in Eastern
Europe. As the German army retreated before the Soviet advance, Eastern
Europeans who had been terrorized and brutalized by their Nazi occupiers
exacted revenge on the ethnic Germans whose ancestors had settled where
they lived centuries before. By 1950, some fifteen million ethnic Germans
had either fled or been expelled from Eastern Europe. Two and one-half
million civilian Germans either died or went missing in the "ethnic
cleansing" of Soviet-occupied Europe in the years immediately following
WWII.

My mother was twelve years old when on January 18, 1945, she and her
mother, brother and grandparents were given twenty-four-hours notice to
load their possessions and evacuate their tiny village of Chodziez near the
Warthe River in central western Poland. The refusal of the Nazi regime to
acknowledge the collapse of the eastern front and to accept the reports
that the war was being lost translated into a complete lack of preparation
for evacuating German civilian populations from the advance of the Soviet
army. Only days before my mother's family was given the order to evacuate,
German men, too old to fight on the eastern front, were busy digging
anti-tank ditches to slow the Soviet advance. In evacuating, my mother's
family joined a line of refugees that stretched westward as far as the eye
could see. Independent descriptions confirm their accounts of this as a
train of chaos, despair, death and misery as people fled in panic for their
lives. Less than two weeks later, the advancing Soviets intercepted the
westward stream and, after pillaging the possessions of trapped refugees,
ordered them to return to their villages. My mother's family, after being
stripped of all their possessions except for the clothes they wore and
carefully concealed money, turned around and walked home. Here women and
girls were raped, and men were beaten and murdered. Through propaganda and
firsthand experience of the brutality of SS "occupation" detachments in
Eastern Europe, Soviet soldiers were convinced that civilian Germans were
little more than dangerous animals to be tortured and liquidated. The
family now stayed as strangers in their own village, their property
expropriated and handed over to Poles. Their new masters ordered the
returning women to refill all those anti-tank ditches dug a fortnight
earlier. My grandmother worked in a Soviet military camp as a virtual
slave, suffering horrors she was never able to describe but which hung over
her life like a cloud of despair until her death. In December 1945, a
carefully hatched plan resulted in my mother's family escaping occupied
Poland for Soviet-occupied Germany.

Meantime, as my mother's family were fleeing their village of Chodziez, at
4 pm on January 19, 1945, ethnic Germans in Komorowo, near Konin, were also
escaping the Soviet advance. Among them were my father, his older sister,
toddler brother, mother and grandmother. The Soviet army rolled into my
father's farm less than twenty-four hours later. A week later, on January
24, my father's family too were captured by Soviet forces, robbed at
gunpoint and ordered to return home. My father was sixteen, the "man" of
the house: his father had perished on the eastern front in 1944. In the
preceding months, he had ignored the whispered urging from retreating
German troops to flee for his life, laughing at the suggestion that Germany
was going to lose the war. Upon returning to his local village, he was
loaded onto a boxcar with all the other German males of his vicinity and
deported to work as a slave laborer at a factory in Charkov in present-day
Ukraine. There he stayed for seven months, at the end of which he was the
bare shadow of a human being, louse-ridden, diseased, and in an advanced
stage of starvation. Small for his age, he was able to lie about his age
and, with all the prisoners under sixteen, he returned to Soviet-occupied
Germany, working in Berlin for two years. Less lucky ones were to remain in
prison until released a few years later, while others, never permitted to
leave, were resettled in Siberia, where most of them perished. It was not
until 1949 that my father found and rejoined the surviving members of his
family.

Excerpt from _Apocalypse Recalled: The Book of Revelation After Christendom_
by Harry O. Maier, 2002 (available from Amazon.com)

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